'Buy the Brooklyn Bridge!': How New York attractions were sold to immigrants

In New York, there have always been many who wanted to cash in on someone else's gullibility. It got to the point of ridiculousness - the Brooklyn Bridge was even sold to the most naive. He told about how this happened in his blog. Levik.

Next - from the first person.

"Well ... If you believe that, then I can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge!" - Now they almost never say that, but when I just arrived in New York in the early 1990s, this expression was still popular here. Its meaning is to call the interlocutor a hopeless gullible simpleton who willingly puts his ears under someone else's noodles.

For a long time I thought that they say that because no one can be so naive as to think that they will actually sell a huge beautiful bridge across the East River. But then it turned out that during the first 50 years of its existence, the bridge was “sold” many times and there were always simpletons who were ready to buy it, having given their savings to scammers.

The Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883 and instantly became the newest wonder of the world. The new bridge connected Brooklyn to Manhattan and eventually led to the unification of New York City into a single metropolis that we know today.

This bridge towered over the city, captivating the imagination of newly arrived immigrants from Europe, who sought to the United States in search of a new life. It was among these people that the scammers found their victims - wealthy and enterprising immigrants who sold everything in the old world to start a new life in America. As a rule, they were with money, but they knew little about life and order in the United States.

Perhaps the most successful of the scammers was George Parker. He is “James O'Brien”, “Warden Kennedy”, “Mr. Roberts”, etc. Over the course of his nearly 30-year career as a fraud, Parker has several times found simpletons willing to buy from him the most famous bridge in the world.

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He himself, towards the end of his career, boasted that he sometimes managed to “sell” the bridge a couple of times a week. The price of the transactions varied from time to time: once Parker allegedly received $ 50. In order to prevent his victims from suspecting anything, he rented premises, disguising them as real estate offices, and was ready to show a large number of documents proving ownership of the bridge.

As a result, for his money, the buyer received a very beautiful, but worthless contract, and Parker himself disappeared in search of new victims.

By the way, he was not limited to the sale of only one bridge: sometimes the swindler traded in the Statue of Liberty, Metropolitan Museum and other New York attractions.

Thanks to his fraud, Parker could afford a rather luxurious lifestyle, but he could not stop looking for new victims.

He was arrested and tried several times - once, having received a conviction, the cunning man escaped from the courthouse wearing the sheriff's clothes, which he had left in the hallway of the courtroom. As a result, he was sentenced to life in prison, and eight years later (in 1936) he died in Sing Sing prison. At that time he was over 75 years old.

But Parker was far from the only crook who traded the Brooklyn Bridge. There were many of them, although not all received such fame.

All of them tried to look for their victims among the newcomers to New York: mostly immigrants, but sometimes tourists from other parts of America. Some of them went for some pretty clever tricks. For example, someone gave bribes to employees of large ocean liners so that they leaked information about wealthy passengers who came to New York in order to profitably invest their money.

Others knew in advance the schedule of all the patrolmen on the bridge, so that you could avoid prying eyes, showing the bridge to a potential "buyer". Some even put up a sign “Selling a bridge” even when the police were not around.

The Europeans who arrived saw a huge potential in buying the largest bridge in the world at that time: after all, crossing it can be paid for and collect huge money by the standards of that time.

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Sometimes the victims sensed something was wrong and wondered why the seller was trying to get rid of such an incredibly profitable asset.

“I love building bridges, not owning them,” one of the scammers said in such cases.

A couple of times it got to the point that the New York police were forced to drive out the unfortunate "owners" who tried to establish toll stations on the bridge. I can only imagine the horror of a man who only at that moment realized that he gave all his money to a fraudster for nothing.

There are so many such cases that the immigration authorities began to issue a small booklet to everyone who comes to New York, which explained that city property was not sold to private hands. After that, the number of deceived people began to decline.